forage

The Bureau of Land Management says it will likely remove fewer wild horses from the range this fall than in the past.

BLM Spokesoman Tom Gorey says that’s because they’re running out of space to put the horses.

“We are almost maxed out in our long-term pastures in the Midwest and the short-term corrals we have in the West, where we put horses that we have removed from the range,” Gorey said. “And we try to adopt out as many as we can, but adoptions have been on the decline.”

A study by the National Research Council finds that the BLM’s management practices for wild horses are economically unsustainable and lack scientific justification.

The BLM removes thousands of horses from public lands each year, to maintain a certain population size. But Guy Palmer, chairman of the committee that wrote the report, says the practice is expensive – and fundamentally flawed.